Analogue Hearts in a Digital Future

Anders Sörman-Nilsson

It is a rather inspiring (and equally daunting) experience for an emerging futurist to be the narrative science fiction arc that binds together Carlos Slim’s entrepreneurial reflections and Condoleeza Rice’s security forecasts. But this is what I had been invited to do in Punta de Mita, Mexico, in 2019, for the country’s top 70 corporate leaders on behalf of their host, Citibanamex. I was as excited about and invested in what these two had to say about the future as I was focused on my own science fiction story of the future. With a sip of high-end tequila in one hand and a translation headset in the other, I leaned back to soak up what Carlos Slim, one of the most successful global entrepreneurs of his generation, had to share with Citibank CEO Mike Corbet during a deep and meaningful dialogue over dinner. In his opening remarks, to my surprise and delight, Slim started quoting Alvin Toffler’s works and philosophies and how impactful they had been and continue to be for his thinking about the future of investment and entrepreneurial creation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In most settings, making investment decisions based on 50-year-old ideas might seem anachronistic. But not so when it comes to Tofflerisms.

Perhaps ironically, given Toffler’s idea of accelerative thrust, many of his ideas have withstood the test of time and are potentially even more potent today, given this thrust is now of the exponential kind. It’s been said that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, and despite the recognition Toffler’s foresights have been afforded by people of Slim’s ilk, the exponential time to really test Future Shock has finally come. We are living in an age where humans no longer have a monopoly on intelligence, where we are becoming cyborgs, with our own intelligence augmented by artificial intelligence.

What concerns me today is not so much that machines are learning—quickly and deeply—but that we as humans, in our state of future phobia, still resist change. And the reality today is that change doesn’t care whether you like it or not. It will always happen without your permission. At the same time, business leaders, politicians, education system designers, parents, and spiritual leaders are running their affairs in ways that are perfectly prepared for an analogue world that no longer exists. As a society, we don’t just have future shock, we also have present shock, and we desperately hope that being nostalgic is the same thing as being strategic. The global rise of populist politicians, waving the magic wand of nostalgia and crooning reversionist time travel narratives, plays to the fears of mushrooming numbers of victims of future shock and promises a return to “the good old days.” In this age, many people’s rearview mirrors seem more vivid than their low-res vision into the future.

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Today, you are competing against the best of global human resources; tomorrow, you will also be competing against the best of artificial resources.

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If ever there was a time to not be ignorant, complacent, or bigoted, that time is now. The rate of change has never been this fast, but will never again be this slow. This sounds shocking, and it truly is testing our adaptive responses. Casting our minds back 50 years, we recall that Toffler wrote when things were in some ways a little simpler, a little slower, a little more binary. This is not to discount his foresight, but simply to point out that in his time, choosing whom to marry didn’t involve the hyperchoice bestowed by Tinder or Grinder, that geopolitics were played out over a dividing curtain by members of either the West or the East, and that reality didn’t need an IRL to differentiate it from its virtual twin.

Today, tech adoption rates are skyrocketing, the longevity of companies on the Fortune 500 is decreasing at a rapid clip, and automation is impacting both our brawn and our brains. In this world, AI will be doing to white collar work what robots have already been doing to blue collar work. Contemporaneously, education is failing to shift out of past tense and suffers a failure of imagination by narrow-mindedly touting the supposed panacea of STEM skills, all of which computers and robots will trump humans at in the future. We are educating our youth for jobs that will no longer exist, and fail to see that today’s digital disruption is a signal from the future that it is time to change—on both personal and societal levels.

For me, future shock is a personal, intergenerational affair. The science fiction author Douglas Adams once described our reactions to new technologies in roughly the following terms:

“Anything that is in the world when you are born is natural, normal and ordinary.

Anything that is invented between the ages of 15 and 35 is new and exciting, and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after the age of 35 is against the natural order of things.”

When I meet people at conferences and during scenario planning sessions around the world, and we discuss how blockchain, gene editing, the Singularity, deep learning, transhumanism, climate change, or digital traceability will impact us tomorrow, someone occasionally glances at me and sighs that he or she would prefer to retire before having to learn any of this new “stuff” (normally using less PC language). When I point out that change and learning are in many ways synonymous, and that learning is something we all enjoyed as kids, some of them squeamishly concede that they could probably invest a little more in their own personal and professional development—indeed, in their own compatibility with the future. The prevalence of reversionist mindsets continues to surprise me, and saddens me to a degree. What is more personally tragic is that this resistance to change is very evident in my own family.

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While the left brain of logic, process, math, and data crunching will be ripe pickings for AI, the right brain of emotion, creation, synthesis, and invention will take longer to pick off.

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My toughest pro bono client is my mum, and it is particularly hurtful to see your own elders become victims of future shock. Mum runs a third-generation, eponymous, family-owned menswear store in Stockholm, Sweden. She runs it in what I describe as a very “analogue,” old-school fashion. Since the turn of the millennium, in an age of digital disintermediation and consumer empowerment, she has lost her bricks and mortar retail “monopoly,” and the margins have vanished. The hockey stick rise of digital retail started after she turned 50, and she has failed to make the adaptive choices necessary to ensure the survival of her now 103-year-old store. For Mum, now in her mid-60s, the future—in Toffler’s parlance—arrived too soon. Instagram fashionistas, influencers, digital procurement, ecommerce, and the mobilization of the consumer’s information-focused rational minds are, from her perspective, “against the natural order of things.”

I am the connective intergenerational glue between Mum and her grandson, Lucien (two years of age at the time of publication). Digital disruption and transformation happened during my formative entrepreneurial years, and I “could get a career in it.” I now have, as a 38-year-old futurist and management consultant. My son, in turn, will never have known a world without the internet, without autonomous vehicles, without artificial intelligence. For him, anything that is in the world today is totally normal, and the lingua franca of business for the foreseeable future—digital—will be native to him. The sad thing is that because his grandmother was so focused on the past—the historical heritage of her family business—he will most likely never have a chance to ensure its future. But it is not just Lucien who will not be able to carry forward the craft, the artisanal, linguistic, and cultural batons, of previous generations. From “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” is a common rule within family businesses, and the rule of 30-13-3 percent holds that this is the equivalent percentage of family companies that successfully pass on the business to the succeeding generation. In other words, only 3 percent are able to successfully pass the business on to the fourth generation, let alone the fifth—a rule that will be challenged even further in the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions as the speed of change is amplified. While not everyone is faced with this type of intergenerational change, every individual is now presented with intragenerational change, whereby your skills, cognition, and adaptive range are tested not once in a generation, but ceaselessly. Today, you are competing against the best of global human resources; tomorrow, you will also be competing against the best of artificial resources.

However, in this disruptive process, there is an analogue silver lining. We have to remember to not throw away the analogue human baby with the digital bathwater. The choice is not necessarily about tradition or technology. National Geographic, for example, has invested heavily in the digitization and codification of minority, indigenous, and oral languages to ensure their survival in an age of linguistic homogeneity, given the spread of Mandarin, English, and Spanish. These efforts recognize that age-old wisdom and culture have tremendous value, and that their digitization ensures intraand inter-generational survival. Similarly, there are elements of our own humanity which will stand us in good stead in an age of machines. While STEM is not an educational panacea, concepts like STEMpathy or STEA[rts]M, which imbue the sciences, technology, engineering, and math with more right-brained skills, are directionally important. Even more critically, we have to invest in humanity’s empathy, creativity, entrepreneurship, innovation, ethics, and emotional intelligence. While the left brain of logic, process, math, and data crunching will be ripe pickings for AI, the right brain of emotion, creation, synthesis, and invention will take longer to pick off.

Given that we will want to code our AI to be ethical and humanely empathetic, we would do well to raise our own game and build these muscles first. We mustn’t digitize faulty or underperforming “human software.” Maybe the irony of this digitization is that it enables humans to tap into their true creative genius. Freed from menial labor, we will have the right and obligation to pursue our true humanity and creativity, ushering in a Second Renaissance of human output.

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Story can capture analogue hearts, and ready our minds to galaxies of possibilities. But our minds will not venture through doors that the heart hasn’t opened. Selling new technologies and bridges to the possible will fall on deaf ears if the audience feels victimized by the future.

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Despite this renaissance hope, the future does run the risk of becoming hacked by analogue reversionists. Just as the discontents of globalization have frightened voters into attempting to reinstate imagined past glory in the UK and the US, we run the risk of seeing a Luddite techlash as the full force of automation ensues. This places an obligation on futurephiles—people like you and me who think the future is potentially a more humane place, one where we have ended inhumane human error because of, for example, sensorily aware, IoT-connected vehicles—to successfully pitch the future to the skeptics. And yes, while our rational minds might have become digitized, our emotional hearts are still ticking analogue. Without winning both the hearts and minds of the key stakeholders around us, the future may not become quite as alluring as Toffler once foresaw. Polarization of various population into globalists and localists during the rise of the populist leaders has sparked dystopian fears; it’s certain that futurephiles and futurephobes pitted against one other is not a scenario conducive to utopia.

As futurists and optimistic realists, we need to create a more engaging and inspirational narrative that humans can buy into—a narrative that provides more meaning and humanity than that offered by the skeptics.

This age-old and fundamentally human ability—storytelling—might well be our most important tool as we design, craft, and shape a more humane tomorrow, enabled by sophisticated robotic brawn and digital brains. Story can capture analogue hearts, and ready our minds to galaxies of possibilities. But our minds will not venture through doors that the heart hasn’t opened. Selling new technologies and bridges to the possible will fall on deaf ears if the audience feels victimized by the future. Your job as a business leader, politician, parent, education system designer, or spiritual leader is to decode tomorrow, and shift your futurephobe stakeholders into futurephiles.

As I took the stage in Punta de Mita the second day of the conference, just prior to Condoleeza Rice’s forecasts, I realized that my mum had given me a tremendous gift. By not listening to my warnings of disruption and future shock, and not heeding Cervantes’s proverb, “to be fore-warned is to be fore-armed,” neither Lucien nor I may be able to carry on the retail torch my great-grandfather once lit, but instead, I get to be a professional science fiction storyteller, opening both hearts and minds around the world on a larger scale, and preparing my clients, my young family, and myself for both foreseeable and unforeseeable futures.

As futurists, we are building more futureness, selling the idea virus of a more humane tech-enabled future, and reducing the number of victims of future shock one by one. Addressing Mexico’s top leaders, I reminded them that transformation is not necessarily about throwing away the analogue baby with the digital bathwater, and that even a Fourth Industrial Revolution proponent and investor in digitization, Carlos Slim, still keeps only analogue paper notes and printed spreadsheets for his own musings, while growing his brands confidently into the future. This analogue human—augmented with a digital mindset—can continue to thrive in a digital world. Maybe there is hope for my mum after all. See you in the future.

Anders Sörman-Nilsson (LLB/EMBA) is a global futurist who helps leaders decode trends, decipher what’s next, and turn provocative questions into proactive strategies. Anders’s view is that the future and the now are converging in a city or start-up near you, giving the curious and the creative a competitive and sustainable edge. Concurrently, that same future contains fearsome forecasts for futurephobes. This Swedish-Australian futurist has shared a stage with Hillary Clinton, Nobel Laureates, and European and Australian heads of state. He is an active member of TEDGlobal, has keynoted at TEDx in the United States and Australia, was nominated to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders in 2019, and was the keynote speaker at the G20’s Y20 Summit in Australia. Clients like Apple, Adobe, Rugby NZ, Mercedes Benz, Gartner, Jaguar Land Rover, and IPG have turned to Anders over the years to help them turn research into foresight and business impact. His books include Seamless: A Hero’s Journey of Digital Disruption, Adaption and Human Transformation (Wiley 2017), Digilogue: How to Win the Digital Minds and Analogue Hearts of Tomorrow’s Customers (Wiley 2013), and Thinque Funky: Upgrade Your Thinking (Thinque 2009). Learn more at www.anderssorman-nilsson.com, www.anderssorman-nilsson.com/blog, and www.thinque.com.